I'd like to share an extraordinary letter, it comes from George Kean of 34 Dalgarroch Avenue in Clydebank. Most of it I've actually had by me for five years. He wrote to me in 1988 and at that stage he said:

"In 1926 a contingent of unemployed left Clydebank to march to London to lobby parliament. They were called the hunger marchers. I was ten years old then...my local hero was a young boxer called Barney McGee who joined the marchers and on arrival fixed himself up with a couple of fights to pay his expenses. I attended Flowerdale School then, now Whitecrook Primary. I lived in Gordon Street and had to go to school via "Killer's Lane" alongside the Forth and Clyde Canal. It was called Killer's Lane because it had been the site of an earlier abattoir.

There was a large flat stone and an open piece of grass there around which several unemployed men would play cards for pennies to augment their means test money. Among them was my father who was a riveter. On my way back from school, I'd stop to see if my father had been lucky. If he had, he'd give me four pennies with which I would buy a quarter of sliced sausage, a quarter of margarine, a quarter of streaky bacon and a quarter of cheese. And that night we'd dine right royally by candlelight because our gas had been disconnected, as was that of most of our neighbors.

The means test caused the breaking up of many families and untold misery and hardship. There were five boys in our family at this time. The two eldest had managed to get jobs as apprentices and because they were earning money, my father's allowance was cut to the bone. So they both left home and went into lodgings so that my father's money could be restored.

Another scheme to get ready money was to purchase a Singer sewing machine on the 'never never' [lay away] at one shilling a week and then immediately to sell it to better-off families at a bargain price so that we could then afford to buy food and clothing.

I can remember David Kirkwood, the Labour Councillor who advocated 'pay no rent'. On voting day I would march up and down outside the polling station with a "Vote for Davy Kirkwood" sign stuck on a bamboo cane and singing,